Elon Musk

Isaacson portrays Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, as a fellow space enthusiast who became a competitor to Musk. Both men had a vision to build reusable rockets. Bezos and his company, Blue Origin, applied for a US patent that described methods of landing a rocket at sea. SpaceX sued, claiming that this idea was not original, and Bezos canceled the patent.

SpaceX developed a Falcon 9 prototype called Grasshopper which could hop up to 3,000 feet and down again. On June 28, 2015, Musk’s 44th birthday, a Falcon 9 exploded, the first time that this model of rocket had failed.

In the meantime, Bezos and his company succeeded in launching a rocket to the edge of outer space and landing it afterward. Musk was annoyed after Bezos declared this a victory, claiming that Bezos’s suborbital hop was not very impressive.

On December 21, 2015, SpaceX succeeded in launching a rocket, sending a payload into space, and landing the rocket. The team burst out into celebratory cheers.

Talulah grew tired of Musk’s focus on his work which caused him to neglect their relationship. She filed for divorce in 2012. However, at the courtroom, when they saw each other again, they started kissing. They went through with the divorce, but then she moved back in with him.

Talulah liked to organize themed parties for Musk. For his 42nd birthday in 2013, Talulah organized a party with a Japanese steampunk theme. Musk fought a sumo wrestler and decided to judo-throw him. He did so but blew out a disk at the base of his neck; ever since, he has suffered from back and neck pain.

Talulah and Elon decided to remarry in July 2013. However, in September 2015, she decided to divorce him again. She made a promise to Musk, comparing him to Mr. Rochester from the novel Jane Eyre, saying that, “[i]f Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come to you and take care of you” (238).

Musk invested $5 million in DeepMind, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup. In 2013, Musk got into an argument with Google’s Larry Page about AI. Musk argued that humans should build safeguards into AI to make sure that AI does not usurp humans, and he believed that Page was not taking his concerns seriously enough. At the end of 2013, Musk heard that Page and Google were planning to buy DeepMind. Musk tried to stop the deal, but Google’s acquisition of DeepMind was announced in January of the following year.

Musk and Sam Altman, a software entrepreneur, decided to cofound a nonprofit AI research lab called OpenAI as a counterbalance to Google. They intended to make its software open-source.

Musk’s interest in AI grew, leading him to launch projects such as Neuralink (implanting chips in human brains), Optimus (a humanoid robot), and Dojo (a supercomputer) and to push for self-driving capability in Tesla cars. This led to a split with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI should be subsumed by Tesla, but Altman disagreed. Musk formed a rival AI team to work on Tesla Autopilot.

The Tesla team wanted to use radar to implement self-driving features, but Musk insisted that the car should only use vision to navigate, since that is the only sense that humans rely on while driving. His employees were uneasy because they felt that this would be unsafe and unrealistic, and they convinced him to equip the car with radar even as he pushed them to develop a camera-only system.

In 2016 the first fatalities involving drivers using Autopilot were reported. Musk often exaggerated the capabilities of Autopilot and that ended up being dangerous. Musk grew angry when pressed about the fatalities because he believed that Tesla Autopilot prevented accidents overall and he felt that it was detrimental to focus on the fatalities because they would dissuade people from using autonomous vehicles, which Musk claimed would be safer than human drivers.

Musk had a vision to build Full Self-Driving, and he started making the prediction every year that Tesla would implement this feature by the end of the year. Ultimately, Musk admitted years later that to develop this capability, one would have to develop “real-world artificial intelligence” (251).

Musk’s cousin, Lyndon Rive, wanted to start a business, so Musk encouraged him to get into the solar industry. Lyndon and Peter, another of Musk’s cousins, founded a solar panel company called SolarCity in 2006, and Musk became chairman of the board.

Musk criticized Lyndon and Peter for focusing on sales rather than the quality of their product. In 2016, as the company was struggling, Musk decided to have Tesla acquire SolarCity. Some of Tesla’s shareholders sued, but in 2022 a Delaware court ruled in Musk’s favor.

Musk continued to be highly critical of Peter and Lyndon’s work. Within a year after Tesla acquiring SolarCity, they left the company.

Musk invested $100 million to found The Boring Company, a company that would build tunnels underneath cities for cars to drive on. The company completed a 1.7-mile tunnel in Las Vegas in 2021, but by 2023, none of its other projects had gotten underway.

Musk visited the White House as part of a roundtable of tech CEOs after Donald Trump was elected as president. Musk came away with the impression that Trump was similar to his dad: He was “one of the world’s best bullshitters ever” (263).

Musk started dating the actress Amber Heard in 2017. They had a tumultuous and unstable relationship, breaking up and getting back together. Musk later compared Amber to his dad, saying that she had the ability to create her own reality.

In 2016, Elon and Kimbal visited South Africa. They went to lunch to celebrate Elon’s 45th birthday and Errol’s 70th. Errol brought his new wife and Elon was accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, “whom he was occasionally dating” (265). Errol made everyone uncomfortable when he commented on Natasha’s looks, but the visit seemed to signal a relatively calm period in Elon and Errol’s relationship. However, later in 2016, Elon found out that Errol got Jana, his step-daughter, pregnant. Elon and his siblings felt angry and disturbed.

In 2017, a Twitter user asked if Musk was bipolar, and Musk said yes. He had not been medically diagnosed. One of Musk’s employees tried to encourage him to seek treatment and support, but Musk did not do so.

The year 2017 marked “production hell” at Tesla, a time when Musk “had one primary focus: ramping up production so that Tesla was churning out five thousand Model 3s per week” (270). He drove employees relentlessly to meet these goals. He exhorted them to question every requirement and delete as many as they could in order to speed up production.

Musk admitted that he had made the factory dependent on automation too quickly and that it was instead more efficient to de-automate certain tasks.

Musk had promised shareholders that his factories would produce 5,000 cars per week by the end of June. By April, the Fremont factory was only producing 2,000 per week. Investors were short-selling Tesla stock, which infuriated Musk.

Musk initiated a surge at Fremont, patrolling the factory and looking for inefficiencies, “going completely apeshit” (279), according to one Tesla head. As with the Nevada factory, Musk decided to de-automate some tasks at the Fremont factory to make it more efficient.

Isaacson describes Musk’s “algorithm,” something he repeated during meetings as Tesla and SpaceX. This algorithm involves questioning all requirements, deleting as many parts and processes as possible, simplifying and optimizing parts and processes, accelerating cycle time, and automating.

In 2018, 12 Thai soccer players and their coach got trapped in a cave. A Twitter user asked Musk if he could help get them out. He started working with his engineers on a mini submarine that could rescue the boys. Musk and seven engineers flew to Thailand with the mini sub on Musk’s private jet. However, by that time, a rescue operation was already underway. A British cave explorer named Vernon Unsworth gave an interview dismissing Musk’s efforts as a public relations (PR) stunt. Musk grew angry, accused Unsworth on Twitter of being a pedophile, and Tesla stock fell.

Tesla’s major investors expressed concern that Musk was acting erratically. Kimbal attributed Musk’s behavior to the anguish over his breakup with Amber Heard.

Musk decided that he wanted to take Tesla private. He started working out a deal with the leaders of Saudi Arabia’s government investment fund. Musk tweeted out his plans, saying that funding had been secured. Tesla stock shot up. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened an investigation. After the fallout, Musk rescinded his proposal to take the company private. To avoid a lawsuit, Musk’s lawyers worked out a deal with the SEC.